POPULAR MUSIC

The Patterns Of Popular Music In Society

Rock and Pop Music

Introduction

Several interrelated developments in global culture since 1980 have had a substantial effect on world popular music and its study. These include the phenomenal increase in the amount of recorded popular music outside the developed world, as a result of the expansion of extant modes of musical production and dissemination and the advent of new technologies such as cassettes; the effective compression of the world by intensified media networks, transport facilities, diasporas and the globalization of capital, which has increased the transnational circulation of world popular musics and their availability in the West; and an exponential growth in the 1990s in the number of scholarly and journalistic studies of world popular musics.

Rock music has its own standards of evaluation, which differ in significant ways from those of traditional musical aesthetics. Rock musicians and serious listeners to rock music know and understand these criteria, which derive from the history and practices of rock music and its antecedents. The traditions from which rock arose (folk, blues, and country) emphasize performance rather than composition, and value the communication of feeling and emotion much more highly than either the formal complexity of the composition or the technical accuracy of the performance. Consequently, rock music is judged more by its effects on the listener's body than by a “disinterested” appreciation of its formal properties. The three principal criteria by which rock is judged are authenticity of voice, rhythm, and loudness. These categories do not exhaust what is important in rock music, but they point to its most obviously significant aspects. This paper discusses pop and rock miusic and their roots. It also compares the pop rock music to sociological concepts and perspectives.

Discussion

Rock and roll appeared quite abruptly as a distinct type of American music and form of popular culture in 1955. At first, it merely served as a trademark phrase to describe the kind of music that a prominent New York City radio personality, Alan Freed, aired on his program. At the time Freed specialized in playing records by popular black musicians, such as Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the Teenagers, all of whom became identified with the new type of music. (Ward, 1986)

In the spring of 1955, by coincidence, a popular film about juvenile delinquency, Blackboard Jungle, provoked global interest in the new American style of music by prominently featuring on its soundtrack “[We're Gonna] Rock around the Clock.” This was a recording made by a white performer, Bill Haley, playing in a jump blues idiom popularized by black musicians in the previous decade. In the two minutes and ten seconds it lasted on screen, the combination of image and song—a shot of sullen teenagers milling outside an urban schoolyard, the sound of Bill Haley and his Comets belting out “ Rock around the Clock”—defined the cultural essence of the music that Freed had named. It would be all about disorder, aggression, and sex: a fantasy of human nature, running ...